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Kate Middleton's distant relatives

30 replies

Hammy02 · 18/04/2011 12:58

Did anyone see the woman on BBC Breadfast this morning. She shares the same Great Grandmother as Kate and this made the news?! That is one hell of a tenuous link. She seemed to be taking it seriously! How funny.

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SummerRain · 19/04/2011 11:00

confuddled.... 200 years to get to 5th cousins isn't necessarily true. If they were all young parents could be a lot less..... think of all the 30 year old grandmothers out there!

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confuddledDOTcom · 19/04/2011 11:26

Ok so if 5 generations all happened to have children at 15 you'd only have to go back 105 years, but that's still going back a long way and the chance of two lines of an entire family all having children that young is a bit slim!

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SummerRain · 19/04/2011 11:32

100 odd years is only the beginning of the 20th century. I know where my great grandparents and their families lived back them, and who all their neighbours were. In fact i could point out my great, great grandmothers house to you (which was probably the family home for a god few generations before that)

I guess it depends on how/where you were raised, my mothers side is rural Irish and people remember stuff like that. My dad's side is Dutch and whilst I have information about family in a direct line back to the 1800's, the closest cousins I could point out on that side are his first cousins.

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TandB · 19/04/2011 12:47

I always think about the issue of "living memory" in family history. So the 1800s seem like a long time ago to me but my great-great-grandparents were born around 1860 or so and some of them lived to around 1930. My grandfather knew them well and could recount at least one story that his grandfather heard from his grandfather relating to the late 1700s! A couple of hundred years isn't actually that long in human terms.

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starlady · 19/04/2011 14:41

I saw the programme last night - and although I am not a royalist - it was a fascinating tale of social mobility, which (apart from the marrying the prince bit) could apply to so many families. Am more downwardly mobile, sadly.

Also, it might be worth for any singles out there to look out for your fourth cousin - more and healthier kids apparently.

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=when-incest-is-best-kissi